Smelling the ocean air here with my hotel room window open... I don't know why, but the smell of salt in the air always reminds me of when I was 4 and my dad had rented this little cabin on a beach in Massachusetts during the winter because it was cheap. The chairs were yellow vinyl and completely uncomfortable. We had to wear our winter coats all the time because there wasn't good heating, or maybe my parents didn't use it to save money. The door was painted red with a white x that covered the whole door and a white border. The cabin always smelled like the ocean.
One weekend it was raining really hard and all of our toys had gotten packed (we must have been moving somewhere), we had nothing to play with, and my parents couldn't send us outside, so my dad went down to the local market and brought back some erasers for us. The erasers were shaped like animals (flat, not a whole 3d body, with ink faces and body details like feathers or fur drawn on them) and they had eyes glued on them with the pupils that move (I used to call them googly eyes). There was a blue dog and a pink rabbit that my sister picked, she got to pick first because she was older, then my brother Bob picked a yellow lion (he was youngest so got to pick next) and a gray elephant. I ended up with a green owl and a red cat which was fine with me. I was playing with the owl and the cat and they were having a conversation about spaghetti. I guess I was irritating the shit out of my dad because he said "owls and cats would never talk to each other because the cat would want to eat the owl so stop pretending they're friends".
I thought about that for a while and then decided the cat should eat the owl. But since the cat was just an eraser and couldn't eat the owl I bit the owl's head off but then decided to keep the rest of him intact so the cat would still have someone to play with. At dinner that night I put my erasers on the table and when my dad saw that I had bitten the head off of the owl he started yelling at me about how I would never get a toy again because I ruined my owl. I tried to explain that I was just doing what he had said to do which was the wrong thing to say because it just pissed him off even more. He took the erasers away from me.
For years after that I would go through his desk when he wasn't home (it had a lock but I figured out how to open it with a screw driver - my brother Bob used to lock himself in the bathroom and not be able to open the door so I got pretty adept with opening locks) looking for my erasers. Never found them.
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